Alice in Iraq

Fiction by Jeannie Perry

 

The first time I met Sunny was at the same coffee shop downtown where I had posted a flyer on the bulletin board:

Tell your war story for $$

(anonymity guaranteed)

with my name and number underneath written sideways several times and cut in between, like the fringe on a hard rock groupie’s t-shirt. I was a graduate student working on a paper for my Human Behavior and Social Environment class and I needed some gritty, dark side of human nature stories to counter balance my own happy childhood and expensive education. I figured war was as good a place as any to start; after all, war is hell. I’d interview a few soldiers, insert some insightful notations and that’d be that; Bob’s your uncle, as they say…

When Sunny called I could tell from her voice on the phone that she’d be worth interviewing; that she had good hard stories to tell. We agreed to a price and I hung up imagining the female soldier’s point of view— somewhere in my imagination between GI Jane and Private Benjamin.

 

We sat at a small table outside where she could smoke and I could watch her smoke. Having quit years ago, I told her it didn’t bother me and I concentrated on my large cup of coffee; that and the occasional bottle of wine being the only vices I had left. I quickly got the impression they didn’t even count as vices in Sunny’s book.

“I left home when I was fifteen and my mom’s boyfriend stopped coming in to my room at night.”

“Stopped?” I asked, watching her light up while opening my notebook on my lap with one hand and holding my coffee in the other.

“Yeah. I had a little sister.”

At first glance she wasn’t a noticeable girl. She was skinny like those girls in high school who could eat whatever they wanted because they had the metabolism of a mountain goat; scrappy skinny, not worry-about-breaking-a-collarbone-when-you-hug-them skinny. Her hair was a non-committal dark blonde and stringy; it just hung at the sides of her face like it didn’t know what was expected of it. She wore a hooded sweatshirt even though it was the middle of June and judging by her hands, I guessed she was somewhere in her barely-twenties.

I looked up to meet her eyes just as they met mine. Her face could easily be lost in a crowd, and she had a deserted town in the middle of nowhere smile— if you blinked at the wrong time you missed it. I looked back down at the empty sheet in my lap and wrote 15 yrs. old.

“So, you moved out of your mom’s house, and went… where?”

“Oh, you know, for awhile I just kind of bummed around, staying with friends and stuff. Then I met Jacob. He was older, out of school, he had his own place over by St. Luke’s. We used to steal shit out of the cafeteria all the time…” She said this matter-of-factly; not right or wrong, just a recollection.

“So I guess I moved in with him a few weeks after I left, and I stayed there for oh, I don’t know, probly six months or so. That’s when I really started using. I mean, like all the time.” She looked down at her cigarette as she tapped it on the edge of the ashtray causing the ash to fall off.

A car horn blared and someone shouted from across the street causing both of us to look over our shoulders. A man with a cell phone held up to his ear was yelling at a taxi driver who had slammed on his brakes, stopping just inches over the thick white line of the crosswalk.

I turned my attention back to Sunny.

“Do you mind telling me what kind of drugs you were using?” I asked, trying to make my voice light and casual while nonchalantly taking a sip of my coffee and promptly burning my tongue.

“The usual, you know: crank, heroin, occasional coke if we could get it.”

“Crank?”

“Yeah, you know, crystal meth.”

“You were smoking it?”

She shot me a quick look of Sarcastic, Are You Serious? And then an even quicker glance of self-reproach, as if she had a mic in her ear and someone had just reminded her of my non-affiliation.

“Yeah, smoking, shooting. Depended on what we had, you know?”

“So you and Jacob were a couple? Living together, I mean.” I traded topics for her candid honesty and carefully blew on my coffee before taking another sip.

“Yeah, I guess so. It was kind of a crazy time and with all the drugs and everything. I mean there were other kids who would crash now and then, but it was mostly just me and Jacob for awhile I guess. Until I met Tom. He was from Seattle and played the drums. Of course he didn’t have any, drums I mean, but you could tell he was real good. Whenever he would play with some sticks on a bucket or cardboard box or something, and people would stop to watch or give us money. That’s when we were on the street, spare changing, when I was with Tom and Becca. And sometimes Becca and I would sing or rhyme, making it up as we went along. Nuts as it sounds, that’s probly the happiest I’ve ever been.” She looked at me. “Like drinking whiskey while listening to Hank Williams III kinda happy, you know?”

“Mm hm” I nodded and smiled. Then admitted, “Maybe more of a red wine and Lucinda Williams happy for me…“

Sunny got it. She flashed a smile at me and I thought maybe I saw a spark of curious commonality before she looked away at the opening of the coffee shop door for a young woman pushing a double stroller.

“So you guys were living on the streets? You and Tom and…” I looked down at my notes. “Becka?” I prompted her, shifting in my chair and sitting up straighter.

“Yeah, I met Tom and we hooked up right away. And then we met Becca at this church that supposably gave away free Entenmann’s every weekend, but we could never get there early enough. And we sort of became like the three musketeers after that. We were always together.” She sat lost in thought, staring at the light blue lighter next to the ashtray on the table between us.

“And where did you stay? I mean, where did you sleep?”

“Oh, you know, here and there. Sometimes we’d sleep in a park if it was nice out, or we’d find an old abandoned building and stake out a spot. ‘Squatting’ I think you’d call it.” She looked up with a little politely-mocking-the-established smile.

“Right. So how long did you and Tom and Becka stay together?”

Sunny’s forehead wrinkled and she squinted as she took a drag.

“Umm, I dunno, awhile.” She paused and turned her head away to exhale.

“I was pretty fucked up back then. I have to admit. I don’t really remember all the details of that time that much. Well, I mean, you’re just living each day, one at a time, you know, you’re just trying to get through. It’s like that story about Alice and the little rabbit with a watch: You know, just a big wide color swirl of getting high and sidewalks and that weird sweet smell your clothes get when you haven’t washed them for a really long time… you know, when they’ve been in your bag for awhile and then you pull them out to wear again somehow they don’t even seem that dirty anymore?”

I nodded; thinking of my camping gear and how the level of clean directly corresponded to the length of the trip.

“But I do remember it was cold and I was sick. Really sick, I mean I couldn’t do anything but lie there I was so sick when they grabbed me. I remember I had a sore throat and all I wanted was some orange juice and cough drops, but instead I had a can of flat Sprite and some old SweeTarts I found in my pocket.”

“What?! When who grabbed you?”

“Some men. They picked me up and threw me in the back of a van; you know one of those ones with no windows—?”

“A panel van?” I asked.

She nodded, “and there were other girls in there too, some of them looked really fuckin young, and they took us to this dive motel on Broadway where they kept us all in this room with the curtains closed for days. Oh my god, it smelled so bad in there: like stale smoke and cunt.

I never saw Becca or Tom again. They probly thought I just took off or something, without even saying goodbye… ” Sunny was now playing with the lighter in her hand; again not good or bad, just a memory.

“What about the men in the motel room?” I stared at her. My mind was shuffling images from a nighttime television drama: kidnapping, rape, torture… I tried to imagine Sunny’s world at fifteen or sixteen years old but all I could see was myself in the middle of the mad motel kidnapping scene like a cut-out paper doll with dotted lines around the edges.

“So, after a few days I guess, they put us all back in the van—“

“How many of you were there?” I interrupted her.

“Oh shit, I don’t know. Maybe twelve or so?”

I nodded without saying anything, waiting for her to go on.

“So, anyway, they took us to an airport. But not a regular one with people everywhere, this was a military one with barbed wire on top of the fence and huge tan metal buildings. Then they loaded us into an old plane with no seats in it and we just had to sit on the floor with our backs against the wall. And then when we landed we were in Iraq.”

“Iraq?”

“Yep.”

“Well…, how long was the flight? How did they keep you all confined?” I asked, trying to buy time for the dramatic images in my mind to catch up to her story.

“They gave us drugs. I don’t really remember the flight so much, but then when we landed and they opened the door all I could see was sand. As far as you could see, nothing but fucking sand. Even the sky was the color of sand.”

“So, they kidnapped you, drugged you, and flew you to the desert?”

Sunny nodded, “to Iraq.”

The woman with the stroller came out carrying a huge to-go cup and the twins I could now see each held a giant cookie.

Sunny was also staring at the twins. “D’you ever wonder about why we’re here? I mean, when you look at the whole world and how many fuckin people there are, doesn’t it make you wonder? I like to think that there’s some sort of plan; that the guys in charge know what they’re doing and they know it’s part of the deal. Like, in their big privileged lives the one thing they have to do is look out for the rest of us. Like we’re all in this together, you know?”

I didn’t say anything.

Sunny broke her glance away from the back of the retreating mom with the cookie-crumbed stroller. She reached for her pack of cigarettes on the table.

“They took us to Iraq for the soldiers. They kept us drugged and they let the soldiers use us for sex.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but I didn’t know what to say.

“And if you got too sick or you tried to get away, or sometimes for no reason, they killed you.” Sunny’s voice matched her face: no affect.

“They killed you?”

Sunny nodded, “they shot one girl sitting right next to me and her blood got all over me.”

“Why? Why did they shoot her?”

She shrugged, “I dunno. Maybe she was sick or something. She didn’t look sick.”

“How could this happen? How could they get away with it?” I couldn’t get the image of shooting a young girl sitting in a folding chair in the middle of the desert out of my head.

“I don’t know. I don’t think very many of ‘em knew about it. You’d see the same guys over and over again. It’s not like they let everyone in on it. Most guys still had to jack off in their tent at night, I guess. And after awhile there were only a few of us left, so you know, you’d have guys coming in one right after another. And with the drugs they all kind of blurred together anyway… then they’d bring in more girls and it was just this sick merry-go-round of soldiers and sex and sand. Like a bad trip to The Rape Carnival in the Desert.

You know, with most of ‘em, it wasn’t even like they thought what they were doing was wrong. They just acted like it was what you do when you’re in war; like it was expected of them. And I wondered how they could do that to someone else’s sister, someone’s daughter, but I don’t think they saw us like that. I think they just used us as an escape from being there, like the video games they play to numb themselves from all the killing. They didn’t see us, not really— not as girls from everyday suburban America. Because if they’d stopped to think about it, stopped to think about their own little sisters, then they couldn’t have done it, right?

But what do I know, ‘I’m just a junkie preaching to the choir.” She looked up from the ashtray on the table. “That’s from a Green Day song.”

I held her gaze and purposefully did not glance down at the long sleeves of her sweatshirt.

“I can’t believe it.” I said, shaking my head slowly. “I can’t believe this. This is beyond military cover-up. Why? Why would they do this?”

“Some of the girls and I thought it was probly because they couldn’t find anyone over there to have sex with. I mean, what with them being Muslim and everything. In all the other wars, there’ve been hookers and stuff. You know, local girls willing to have sex if they paid them.”

“But how could it happen without anyone finding out?”

“Because they killed everyone.” Sunny said with patience, but no emotion.

“But all those missing girls…” I stopped as the realization tumblers in my mind clicked into place. All those missing girls… runaways were a dime a dozen in this city. How many times a day did I walk by a flyer in a window with a picture of a smiling missing girl.

“All those missing girls,” Sunny said, “are buried in the desert.”

“How? How could they even think of doing this?”

Sunny reached for her cup of coffee, “I dunno. I guess they just think about it for themselves, you know? They don’t think about us. Like I said, they don’t even really see us. They just use us like they use up everything else.” She tipped the white paper cup to her lips.

“How did you get out?”

“I got lucky. One of the younger soldiers snuck me out of camp in a Humvee and gave me some cash. He said I looked like his sister.” She said with her too-quick smile.

“You seem very calm, don’t you hate them?”

“Hate who? The boys killing and dying in the desert? That’d be like blaming a dog for the color of its leash.”

“What about the men in charge, the men who kidnapped you and took you there, don’t you want them brought to justice?”

She looked at me like I was a puppy trying to get out of a box in front of the supermarket. “You talk like someone on tv: ‘Brought to justice.’ What would I do to those men? They’re trapped here with the rest of us, nowhere else to go, and they know what they did, they’re the ones that have to live it every day. What does it matter where they are, just being them is like their own little personal pan prison. I mean, instead of taking care of me and protecting me, they used me. They treated me, and all those other girls, like cases of whiskey or cigarettes; something to be brought in in cargo, used up and thrown away.”

“Like a commodity.” I said, watching her push the crumpled butt of her cigarette into the ashtray.

She looked up at me, “What?”

“Like a commodity. Something that’s traded or sold. You know, like pork bellies or frozen orange juice.”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “Like a commodity. You know how they say ‘war is hell’? Well, war is rape. That’s what I say. Rape of women. Rape of land. Rape.”

Sunny sat there, in her jeans and sweatshirt, smoking and drinking coffee and living with the worst of what humanity can do. She sat there in silence while everyone walked right by her.

“How do you think they can do it? War, I mean. How do you think they can continue doing it?” I asked her.

“I don’t think they realize we’re all the same.” She said. “That their actions affect all of us, including them. And that we are all on this planet together and our differences don’t add up to half as much as we are the same. Sure, they have their big lives and their war strategies, but it doesn’t matter. They take themselves so seriously and in the end they’re here, just like the rest of us; on our own for as long or short as life is. And then they’re gone. And they didn’t do anything good. Hell, they didn’t even try. They didn’t even come close. They’re just as good as a junky sitting on the sidewalk playing the drums on a cardboard box.”

 

Jeannie Perry lives in Carbondale CO, where she reads and writes and publishes AlicetheMag.